Web Mail Notifier Sillyness
We have a dedicated build wall which is pretty efficient in displaying the build information. It really is!
BUT, ever since I moved my desk away from the big screen TV's that display the build notifications, it makes it difficult to tell what's the status of the builds at our morning stand-up.
This was until a couple of days ago a friend got me hooked on to the "USB Web Mail Notifier" available here. (Although, I bought mine off some random dude on EBay (from the UK).
All I really needed was to know if our Nightly Builds that run our Unit and Integrations Tests failed.
Now I know that there are heaps of other ways to get this information but the one I went with appealed to my inner nerd :)
By using a simple powershell script I am able to query our Team Foundation Server (TFS-2010) to see if the latest Nightly Build has been successful.
The powershell script and the binaries required to use the USB light are available here at http://tiny.cc/BuildNotification.
You need to customise the powershell script by entering your details in the "Set user variables" section of the script:
This is what it looks like.
When developers have been naughty (and not run integration tests locally before checking in) ...
But after you fix it, all is good ..